2. Contact Info

3. Dealer Selection

It’s Sunday morning and I should be lazing around the house. Instead, I’m heading north on Route 101 out of L.A. to Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, where, in a couple of days’ time, testing for Motor Trend‘s 2012 Best Driver’s Car Competition will begin. I could just sit back, relax, crank up the stereo and take the highway all the way to Monterey.

But where’s the fun in that?

One of the programs I most love producing for the Motor TrendYouTube channel is “Epic Drives.” The clue is in the name: Among the episodes screened on the channel so far, Frank Markus took an Audi R8 Spyder through Norway in search of Vikings; I ran 200 mph on a German autobahn in a Corvette ZR1 with Le Mans GT2 champion Justin Bell bravely sitting in the passenger seat; and Jonny Lieberman hot-lapped his Cadillac CTS-V wagon on the legendary Nurburgring Nordschleife.

But you don’t have to go around the world in search of automotive adventure. The secret is to take the road less traveled. That’s why I’m about to turn right off the 101 and take some of my favorite back roads to Monterey. The total distance is about 400 miles, and only a fifth of it will be on a freeway. The rest will be on roads tailor-made for something fast and charismatic. Something like a Ferrari California.

The California was the first Ferrari with a direct-injection engine, and the first with a dual-clutch automated manual transmission. It’s built on an aluminum-intensive platform and comes standard with massive carbon-ceramic brakes. The front-mounted engine sits behind the front axle centerline, and the transmission is mounted between the rear wheels, so the California has just 47 percent of its 3900 pounds sitting over the front tires.

I’m driving the 2012 model, which means it has a 453-hp, 357-lb-ft version of the 4.3-liter V-8 up front. For 2013 the California gets an extra 30 hp and 15 lb-ft, thanks to new pistons and exhaust manifold, and a remapped engine computer. It’s also 66 pounds lighter. Even so, the 2012 edition will hit 60 mph in fewer than 4 seconds, and run the quarter mile in about 12 seconds even. Ferrari claims a top speed of 194 mph.

This is one of few Ferraris without a numerical model ID, and it recalls one of the most famous names in Maranello’s back catalogue. The original Ferrari California was built in 1957 at the request of John Von Neumann, the company’s West Coast representative. Von Neumann convinced Enzo Ferrari there was a market in the U.S. for an open-top variant of the Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta — a convertible that was sportier than the regular 250 GT Cabriolet.

Just over 100 California Spiders were built between though 1963, all powered by 3.0-liter V-12 engines, and they are among the most desirable classic Ferraris of all. In 2008, British radio personality Chris Evans paid almost $11 million for a black 1961 California Spider once owned by actor James Coburn. That makes the $200,000-plus price tag for today’s Cali seem almost cheap. Almost.

Even on a Sunday morning, the 101 is a white-noise roar of traffic, a constant stream of cars and trucks and minivans and SUVs. America’s highways are the sinews that connect the country’s economic muscle — the arteries that enable the free and efficient flow of citizens and commerce. And because they make traveling across this vast country so easy, they keeps traffic away from a lot of interesting roads. Roads that are just made for driving.

Roads like California State Route 33, which jumps off the 101 near Ventura, and winds north through the town of Ojai and into the rugged Transverse Ranges. This winding ribbon of bitumen climbs steadily all the way up to the 5160-foot Pine Mountain Summit before swooping majestically down into the Cuyama Valley, where tree-covered slopes make way for an open plain and a man-made forest.

North of Maricopa, Route 33 runs right through the Midway-Sunset Oil Field. Discovered in 1894, it has produced more than three billion barrels of oil, and has estimated reserves of about 500 million barrels. They’re still drilling new wells. There’s something eerily primordial about the big pumps nodding quietly all around as you drive past; saurian machines feeding on the same organic material dinosaurs munched on millions of years ago. Instead of the sharp tang of sage and pine and oak swirling through the California’s cockpit, there’s the pungent aroma of raw hydrocarbons. I don’t need the roadside signs to know I’m driving “The Petroleum Highway.”

A few miles north I turn left off Route 33 and head west along Route 46 towards Paso Robles. The road used to be two-lane all the way, but is being slowly upgraded to highway status to handle the growing volumes of traffic shuttling between Interstate 5 to the east and Route 101 to the west. But it’s a still a two-lane where Route 41 comes in from the north from Fresno to one of the most notorious intersections in history. For here, on September 30, 1955, Hollywood heartthrob James Dean died in a car crash.

At around 5:45 p.m. that day, as Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder approached the junction from the east, a 23-year-old student named Donald Turnupseed was heading in the opposite direction from Paso Robles, bound for Fresno. At the last second, Turnupseed turned his 1950 Ford Custom coupe right across the path of Dean’s oncoming Porsche, heading for Route 41. Dean desperately pitched the little Porsche sideways, clipping the left-hand corner of the big Ford. The impact flipped Dean’s car into the air before it landed on its wheels in a nearby gully, a mangled wreck.

Dean died en route to hospital in Paso Robles. The young actor, who’d shot to superstardom with his screen debut in “East of Eden,” had just wrapped his third film, “Giant,” and was on his way to the Salinas Road Races. The racing bug had bitten Dean hard – just months earlier he’d traded his MG TD for a new Porsche 356 Speedster, which he’d raced at Palm Springs, Bakersfield, and Santa Barbara, finishing in the top three on two occasions. He had swapped the Speedster for the 550 Spyder, a factory sports racing car that was lighter and faster than the Speedster, just nine days before the crash.

Paso Robles straddles Route 101, and after an overnight stop in one of those anodyne, anonymous, neon-lit hotels that infest America’s major highways like mold in a dirty bathroom, I point the Ferrari west again and head into San Luis Obispo County. I wind through rolling, open hills, passing over the dam wall that created the 18-mile long Lake Nacimiento, before swinging north towards King City, where the 101 jinks northwest en route to Salinas. I’m never more than a few miles from one of California’s major freeways, yet the lack of traffic is amazing.

These fast, sweeping, open roads are perfect for a grand turismo like the Ferrari California. I have to keep reminding myself that this is the soft Ferrari, a Ferrari that has been bought by more women than any in the company’s history. The 4.3-liter flat-plane crank V-8 screams like a race engine to the redline, and when I fire off one of the lightning-fast shifts from the seven-speed dual clutch transmission, the exhaust cracks like a 30.06 on a frosty November morning. I’d like a little more bite from the front end in the twisty stuff, but once it takes a set, the California grips, grunts, and lunges for the next corner.

After driving the sharply focused, staggeringly competent 458, I was prepared to be disappointed with the “dilettante’s” Ferrari. But I’m not. It feels like a Mercedes SL con brio — lighter, more nimble, slightly more edgy. It has a different soundtrack, too; a couple of octaves higher all the way through the rev range. Yet it’s remarkably user-friendly. You can mooch around town in full automatic mode and it’s as easy to drive as… well… an SL. This is a Ferrari you could live with every day.

I rejoin the 101 at King City, but stay on it only for about 10 miles before following the hard-to-spot sign to Route G16, which takes me west again, twisting and turning across the Santa Lucia Range before sneaking through the back door into Carmel Valley. The first few miles are nice and open, but as I climb farther into the hills, the road gets narrow and rough in places. Here you need a car with good suspension travel, and shocks that keep the body motions well-controlled.

The California is relatively softly sprung, which helps it ride the rough stuff really well, and it is only occasionally caught out by a sharp mid-corner bump or dip. Through here you can really work that 4.3-liter V-8 hard, letting the engine howl all the way to 8000 rpm, rapid-firing gearshifts via the carbon-fiber paddles. As with most front-engine, rear-drive roadsters, the best technique is to brake hard on the entry to corners and get the car settled before you turn in, though the California handles rapid changes of direction remarkably well. It’s an exhilarating ride through the quiet hills and sun-dappled vales, and I’m still grinning as I turn off G16 in the heart of Carmel Valley and cruise over Laurel’s Grade to the entrance to Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.

Yeah, I could have spent Sunday at home, and driven up the freeway in a comfortable six hours or so; just another drone on cruise control, dodging the semis and RVs and Highway Patrol, numb to the America lurking just beyond my peripheral vision, beyond the gas stations and fast food joints and cheap hotels. But taking the road less traveled turned a mundane road trip into an Epic Drive.

Share this article in:

We’ve Temporarily Removed Comments

As part of our ongoing efforts to make MotorTrend.com better, faster, and easier for you to use, we’ve temporarily removed comments as well as the ability to comment. We’re testing and reviewing options to possibly bring comments back. As always, thanks for reading MotorTrend.com.